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Friday, January 31, 2014

First Educational Readings for 2014

By Allan Alach

Welcome back to another year of educational
miscellany. Let’s hope that it brings
some serious GERM disinfection around the world.

“The
Big Lie is all about extrinsic motivation; getting the grade to prove something
to somebody else. Grades become stand-ins for self-worth. Everything we know
about teaching and learning revolves around this one true thing: real education
only occurs with intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn just because of a
student's passion for the subject. Everything else is crap that lives in a
student's brain just barely long enough to pass a test. No wonder students
cheat and plagiarize; they've been told education is a game, and they need to
win it.’

As
John Dewey wrote, "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own
child, that must the community want for all of its children." If
education is really the civil rights issue of our era, it is about time those
people making policies for our schools begin to provide for other people's
children what they provide for their own.’

‘Attacking
teachers and their unions in the hope that this will improve the quality of
education, while assuming that better education is the key to escaping poverty,
is thus a doubly misguided strategy. Of course, if destroying unions is the
goal, and reducing poverty is only a fig leaf, the current discourse and
strategy of the corporate education reformers makes excellent sense.’

‘Yet
our current obsession with data has led us to crush the spirits of our
children, to make sure that budding Mozarts and Einsteins and those who dream
instead of conforming are pressed into the same narrow mold.’